NEW YORK: Canadian-Pakistani Farhan Zaidi is set to be named the general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, according to the Los Angeles Times quoting “people familiar with the situation”.

Dodgers are a Major League Baseball (MLB) team which is hugely popular in the West Coast of the United States.

A formal announcement of Zaidi’s appointment will be made later in the week, the newspaper added.

Zaidi has a particularly unique background. He is of Pakistani descent and was born in Canada as the son of a British-educated engineer.

He was raised mostly in the Philippines, where he played Little League, and is one of few Muslims in baseball, the Times said.

The 37-year-old Zaidi has a bachelor’s degree in economics from MIT and a doctorate in the same subject from UC Berkeley.

His hiring should bolster the analytics programme championed by Andrew Friedman, the team’s new president of baseball operations.

Zaidi, the LA Times said, attributed his fondness for the analytic side of baseball started to develop when he was in grade school and picked up a copy of “The Bill James Baseball Abstract” in a bookstore.

“I bought that book each year and I basically carried it around with me everywhere,” he said. “Then I think the bookstore realised there was only one customer for the book and they stopped carrying it.”

Published in Dawn, November 7th, 2014